ncaahoopR is an R package for working with NCAA Basketball Play-by-Play Data. It not only scrapes play by play data and returns it to the user in a tidy, but also allows the user to explore the data with assist networks and in game win-probability charts.

Note: ncaahoopR scrapes data from ESPN. Since ESPN is currently updating many college basketball pages, such as schedules and rosters, some functionality may be temporarily unavailable. Once we approach the beginning of the season, all functionality should work as desired.

You can install ncaahoopR from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("lbenz730/ncaahoopR")

Several functions use ESPN gameIDs. You can find the gameID in the URL for the game summary, as shown in the url for the summary of the UMBC-Virginia game below.

• get_pbp(team): Game entire 2017-18 Season's worth of play-by-play data for a given team.
• get_pbp_game(gameIDS): Get play-by-play data for a specific vector of ESPN game ids.
• get_roster(team): Get a particular team's roster.
• get_schedule(team): Get a team's schedule.
• get_game_ids(team): Get a vector of ESPN Game IDs for all games in which team plays in.

Used to create college basketball assist networks.

Usage: assist_net(team, node_col, season, rmv_bench, tree, three_weights, message = NA)

• team is the ESPN team name, as listed in the ids dataframe.
• node_col is the node color for the graph
• season: Options include "2018-19" (for entire season), or a vector of ESPN game IDs.
• rmv_bench: Logical. If TRUE, removes all players who aren't in the network.
• tree: Logical. If TRUE, draws graph in tree structure. If FALSE, draws graph in circle. Tree structure is recommended for single game networks, while circles are recommended for entire season networks.
• three_weights: Logical. If TRUE, assisted three point shots are given 1.5 weight. If FALSE, assisted three point shots are given weight 1. In both cases, assisted 2 point shots are given weight 1.
• Message (default = NA) Option for custom message to replace graph title when using a subset of the season (e.g. conference play).

Plots win probability chart for given game. Usage:wp_chart(gameID, home_color, away_color, show_legend = T)

• gameID ESPN gameID for the desired win probability chart.
• home_col Chart color for home team.
• season: Chart color for away team.
• show_legend: Logical, whether or not to show legend/text on chart. Default = TRUE.

For more information about how these win-probability charts are fit, check out the below links

• Model Methodology
• Game Excitement Index

dict A dataframe for converting between team names from various sites.

• NCAA: the name of the team, as listed on the NCAA website
• ESPN: the name of the team, as listed on the ESPN URLs
• ESPN_PBP: the name of the team, as listed on the ESPN Play-By-Play logs
• Warren_Nolan: the name of the team, as listed on WarrenNolan.com
• Trank: the name of the team, as listed on barttorvik.com
• name_247: the name of the team, as listed on 247Sports.com

ids A dataframe for converting between team names from various sites.

• team: the name of the team to be suplied to function in ncaahoopR package
• id: team id; used in ESPN URLs
• link: link; used in ESPN URLs

Single Game Assist Network assist_net("Oklahoma", "firebrick4", 400989185, rmv_bench = T, tree = F, three_weights = T)

Season Long Assist Network assist_net("Yale", "royalblue4", "2017-18", rmv_bench = T, tree = F, three_weights = T)

NOTE: The use season = "2017-18" would be replaced with the current season. Backdated charts are currently not avaiable.

Win Probability Chart---2018 NCAA Championship Game wp_chart(401025888, "navy", "goldenrod1")